Library News Blog

Dr. Keramet Reiter is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and at the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine. She received her JD and PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley and a master's degree in Criminal Justice from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. She studies prisons, prisoners' rights, and the impact of prison and punishment policy on individuals, communities, and legal systems.

Her latest book is titled 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and The Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement. Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in U.S. prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners in solitary spend twenty-three hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end. They are held entirely at administrators' discretion, with no judges or juries involved. In 23/7, legal scholar Keramet Reiter tells the history of an original "supermax," California's Pelican Bay State Prison, where extreme conditions sparked statewide hunger strikes in 2011 and 2013-—the latter involving nearly 30,000 prisoners. Reiter describes how the Pelican Bay prison was created—with literally no legislative oversight—as a panicked response to the perceived rise of black radicalism in California prisons in the 1970s. Through stories of gang bosses, small-time parolees, and others, she portrays the arbitrary manner in which prisoners are chosen for solitary confinement, held for years, and routinely released directly onto the streets. Here we see the social costs and mental havoc of years in isolation. The product of fifteen years of research in and about prisons, this book is instant required reading on a topic that increasingly commands national attention.

After the book talk, there will be a book raffle. Dr. Reiter will be available for book signing.

Refreshments will be served at this event.

—

Sociology Talk presented by the Department of Sociology. Co-sponsored by Lloyd Sealy Library.

Do you need one-on-one help with your research project or assistance finding appropriate resources for an assignment? Would you like to improve your research skills? If yes, then drop into one of the Library’s Walk-in Research Clinics and get the help you need just when you need it most.

This week we showcase Open Access publishing with an exhibit in the Library’s Niederhoffer Lounge. Please do visit our physical exhibit, and/or our online Library guides on Open Access . Find out how John Jay professors are sharing and preserving their research outputs on CUNY’s institutional repository Academic Works.

John F. Timoney (1948-2016) rose through the ranks of the New York Police Department to become Chief of Department and then First Deputy Commissioner under Police Commissioner Bill Bratton (1994-1996). He was later Police Commissioner in Philadelphia and Chief of Police in Miami. Chief Timoney was also a John Jay College alumnus, graduating in 1974 with a degree in History. In 2010, I sat with John Timoney for an oral history interview, during which he discussed his career in the NYPD and the transformation of the department under Bratton, especially the introduction of Compstat. Read this interview in our Digital Collections.

Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Associate Professor

Lloyd Sealy Library

—

More resources about John F. Timoney from the Lloyd Sealy Library

Beat Cop to Top Cop: A Tale of Three Cities, Timoney's 2010 memoir published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, is available at the Library: Stacks HV7911 .T563 A3 2010 (catalog record).

"Police Leadership Lessons Learned Along the Way," a 2007 panel featuring John F. Timoney and other law enforcement officials. The panel recording is available as a DVD under call number: Media Reserve DVD-JJ8051 (catalog record).

"A New Beginning?: Exploring the Criminal Justice Challenges Over the Next Four Years," the 4th annual Harry F. Guggenheim Symposium held at John Jay in 2009. Panel 4, "Privacy, Civil Liberties and Homeland Security," features John F. Timoney and others. The panel recording is available as a DVD under call number: Media Reserve DVD-JJ8162 (catalog record).

John F. Timoney's yearbook photo (left) from the 1974 John Jay yearbook. Source: John Jay College Archives, Special Collections, Lloyd Sealy Library.

The library has just started a new subscription to Kanopy, a video-streaming service for educational institutions providing on-demand access to more than 26,000 films of all genres and across the disciplines. It includes documentaries, feature films and instructional films. An unlimited number of users can watch a film simultaneously making it ideal for whole-class assignments. Award-winning collections include titles from PBS, BBC, Criterion Collection, Media Education Foundation and more.

Brought to you by your Student Council, your Library, and Public Safety...

The 24-hour Library Lounge + Lab, Spring 2016!

The Niederhoffer Lounge & Reserve Lab will be open continuously 8:30am on May 9 until 10pm on May 26, 2016.

That’s 400+ straight hours of open study space!

Computers, printers, scanners, and study tables will be open for student use in the Lounge & Lab. These are located on the first floor.

The Stacks (bookshelves) will not be open for student use outside of regular Library hours. Librarians and Circulation staff (including the Reserve Desk) will not be open outside of regular Library hours.

In last Fall’s Classified Information, I reported on our acquisition of The Records of the Fortune Society. Since that time, the Fortune Society gifted more records to the Library and the collection is now 80 linear feet of records. In accessioning the collection, we have been finding many gems in the collection which were on exhibit at the event celebrating the gift, on April 11, and will soon be displayed in the Library. We thank David Solomon, Sherrie Goldstein and JoAnn Page and everyone at the Fortune Society for making this gift happen.

David Rothenberg standing with staff and a supporter outside the Fortune Store, which sold prisoner-made objects. The store opened in 1969 and closed in 1973 when the NY-DOC no longer allowed the sale of prisoner-made items.

Fortune News, December 1973 featuring drawing by Gary McGivern, then incarcerated at Green Haven Prison; his papers are in the Lloyd Sealy Library.

In the 1990s we received a gift of The Records of the International Association of Women Police (IAWP). In March 2016 we received an additional 38 linear feet of records which had been previously stored at the University of Illinois Archives. This gift fills many gaps in the history of the IAWP, which celebrated their centennial in 2015. An unexpected surprise was that the boxes also contained the papers of two previous IAWP presidents, Dr. Lois Lundell Higgins, IAWP president 1956-1964 and Felicia Shpritzer, IAWP President 1972-1976. We will be processing and describing this collection over the next months. We thank IAWP Historian, Georgina Bellamy and U. Illinois Archivist April Anderson for facilitating the transfer of this important collection.

Lieutenant Felicia Shpritzer’s papers document her 34 years of service in the NYPD. Included in these papers are documents related to her successful lawsuit against the NYPD to allow women to sit for the sergeant’s exam. Lt. Shpritzer also has an early John Jay College connection; she earned a MA in Police Science at the College of Police Science at Baruch College.

The police give in, name 2 women sergeants. (1965, Mar 13). From New York Times (1923-Current File) (Link).

Dr. Lois Lundell Higgins was a criminologist and policewoman with a long career in many Chicago criminal justice agencies. Her papers document her life, her extensive work in youth crime and drug abuse prevention, as well as her editorial work on Chicago Police Department publications. It must be in the latter role that she acquired 50 rare photographs and hundreds of large format negatives of the Chicago Police Department dating from the early 20th century through the 1960s.

First meeting of the Chicago Association of Detective Sergeants, 1918.

Early photo of policemen assigned to an unknown Chicago precinct.

In January, 2016, John Jay professor Elizabeth ‘Zabby’ Hovey and I met in San Francisco Bay Area to review her father’s papers, The Scott Hovey Papers, 12 boxes of which arrived to the library later in the month. Scott Hovey’s papers relate to his work in setting up early electronic systems and computer programs to facilitate communications and emergency response. The bulk of the papers document Hovey’s administrative and programming work on emergency response systems which integrate all first responder agencies and immediately identify a caller’s location, a concept he called “Enhanced 911” or “E-911.” These files document the implementation of E-911 for the city of Saint Louis, MO and Alameda County in California. We will be processing and describing these papers over the next months. A May 2013 Oral History interview with Scott Hovey by Jeffrey Kroessler is in the final stage of processing and will soon be available on our digital collections. We thank the Hovey family for donating this important collection.

Digitization Update

The Special Collections has been moving ahead on our project Digitizing Policing project, also reported upon in our last Classified Information. Nearly all of the images in the Joseph P. Riccio Jr. Collection of Historical Police Images are now fully cataloged and digitally available (jjay.cc/ricciocollection). We have created a new website for Law Enforcement News (lib.jjay.cuny.edu/lawenforcementnews) to allow readers to follow the progress of digitization of this serial.

At present, the 1975–1985 issues are available on the Internet Archive; individual issues are linked from this page. While table of contents are indexed for most issues (1981–2005) on Criminal Justice Periodicals Index, we have decided to feature the interviews with police and criminal justice executives which regularly appeared in the ‘centerfold’ of every issue. Metadata has been added in the form of searchable subject headings on the interviewees and agencies featured in each issue. These interviews as well as the other articles allows readers to follow details and frank discussion over three decades of development and change in criminal justice. The entire run of Law Enforcement News will be fully digitally available by the end of June. We are regularly uploading collections and items to our digital collections. Follow this link for a full list of collections: jjay.cc/digcoll.

New Special Collections Room Update

Contractors have been hard at work building the suite of rooms south of the Haaren Hall atrium which will eventually be our new Special Collections Room. We have been discussing and planning this room for more than a decade, and it is exciting to watch it take shape. We look forward to our grand opening, perhaps by the end of 2016. We thank Marc Harary and Kishel John for managing this project.

For more information on these or any of our Special Collections, please contact me at ebelcher@jjay.cuny.edu or ext 8238.

A new tool to help prospective authors choose a journal, thinkchecksubmit.org, has been developed by a consortium of reputable publishers and scholarly communication non-profits. Rather than credentialing journals to trust and which to avoid, think check submit encourages authors to use a checklist and trust their own judgement as to the appropriateness of a journal for their work. Here is their checklist:

Do you or your colleagues know the journal?

Have you read any articles in the journal before?

Is it easy to discover the latest papers in the journal?

Can you easily identify and contact the publisher?

Is the publisher name clearly displayed on the journal website?

Can you contact the publisher by telephone, email, and post?

Is the journal clear about the type of peer review it uses?

Are articles indexed in services that you use?

Is it clear what fees will be charged?

Does the journal site explain what these fees are for and when they will be charged?

In November 2011 the CUNY Faculty Senate adopted a resolution supporting the development of an open-access institutional repository (IR). It was further resolved that the faculty — working through the University Faculty Senate and the Office of Library Services — should develop guidelines for depositing materials into that repository. CUNY Academic Works, the name given to the CUNY IR, was launched in March 2015. Representative of a range of scholarly and creative works by members of the CUNY community, the repository now contains over 9,150 papers, including peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, and student works such as theses and dissertations. With Academic Works off to a successful start, it is time to begin a conversation about what guidelines faculty wish to adopt relating to the archiving and sharing of their works in this new institutional repository.

Brief History of Open Access

The open access movement in the scholarly communications field grew out of the confluence of three issues: economics, ethics, and widespread access to the Internet. Economic concerns related to escalating prices for journals, particularly in the STEM disciplines, coupled with the fact that much of the research published in these journals was government funded, in effect, requiring taxpayers to pay twice, once for the research and then again for access to the research results. Increasingly frustrated by copyright agreements restricting their ability to broadly disseminate their works and by the fact that publishers, not authors, were the ones reaping the direct financial benefits, scholars were inspired by the World Wide Web to find new ways to reach a wider audience. While recognizing the added value of working with experienced publishers, increasingly authors are questioning whether it is necessary to give publishers complete copyright control over all their works. Some authors are opting to publish their work in open access journals; others are publishing in pay for access journals and then self-archiving a copy in an open access repository. (For a more complete, but focused history of the open access movement we recommend Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview).

Open Access Journals vs. Open Access Repositories

Open access (OA) literature has been defined as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions” (Suber, Overview). As journals move from print format to electronic dissemination, some, including mainstream journals, are now either completely or partially open access. Some appear to be using limited open access as a public relations tool: Springer recently opened up a small subset of its articles to mark National Criminal Justice Month. In addition, a growing number of journals that are not following an open access model are expressly permitting authors to self-archive some version of their published articles on web sites including their institutional repository (see SHERPA/RoMEO, a database of publishers’ policies on copyright and self-archiving). To make it easier to protect an author’s right to deposit works in an institutional repository, many faculty bodies are adopting policies requiring its members to do so, effectively overwriting any provisions in publisher agreements to the contrary. Luckily, these policies do not appear to have limited in any way the places in which authors are choosing to publish.

Today, Directory of Open Access Journals includes over 11,000 open access journals and Registry of Open Access Repositories lists over 4,000 open access repositories. CUNY is the publisher of some of these open access journals (see e.g., CiberLetra,Revista de Critica Litereraria y de Cultura, Journal of Literary Criticism and Culture, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, LLJournal, and Urban Library Journal). Using the policies of the Urban Library Journal as an example, it is not unusual for open access journals to unabashedly encourage authors to deposit their works in institutional repositories so long as there is an acknowledgement of its initial publication in said journal.

Some repositories are established and maintained by academic institutions like CUNY’s Academic Works; some are focused on data and others serve the interests of a specific discipline. Increasingly popular are the social networking platforms created by for-profit companies that enable researchers to share their work, promote their research interests and communicate with one another. These platforms are neither repositories nor open access vehicles. Key features of open access repositories are the permanence of the posted content and the unimpeded access for all viewers. The social media platforms allow account holders to remove their materials after posting and force potential viewers to create accounts before gaining access to the work. There is considerable debate about the appropriateness of these networks for sharing academic work, the long-term goals of the companies behind them, and the ethical ramifications of using them. Nevertheless, they have wide appeal and do demonstrate the principle underlying the open access movement: the desire to widely share one’s work. The chart shows some of the tools John Jay faculty are using to provide access to their works.

Policies to deposit work in Institutional Repositories

As illustrated by activity of John Jay faculty, CUNY’s commitment to open access is still in the early stages. Does CUNY, a public university funded by taxpayers and a community of scholars interested in sharing its research with the broadest possible audience, want to increase that commitment? Faculty at the University of California, Harvard, Kansas State, Rutgers and MIT and over 530 university or research institutions have adopted policies requiring faculty to deposit their articles in their respective institutional repositories, as reported in The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARmap). Might departments and/or colleges and/or the entire City University be ready for that step? What information does the faculty need to make this decision?